They came to San Francisco seeking something more — something significant, something transcendent. By the summer of 1967, a half-century ago this year, nearly 100,000 hippies and counterculture kids had gathered in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood to drop acid, indulge in free love, and escape the confining strictures of their middle-class upbringings. They wanted to join the revolution.
Yet the utopia called the Summer of Love wouldn’t last, and, after the movement faded out, not all of them went back to professional career paths. Disillusioned by bad trips and a sense that their pursuit of hedonism had been empty, thousands of burned out hippies soon experienced something possibly even more revolutionary than tuning out and turning on: a born-again religious conversion.
Sex, drugs, and — Jesus? It’s not what the Summer of Love generally calls to mind. But of all the things that came out of San Francisco in 1967, perhaps none was more unexpected, or more consequential, than the Jesus Freaks or, as they were more commonly known, the Jesus People.
While they would give up their drugs and promiscuous sex, the Jesus People retained much of their countercultural ways, bringing their music, dress, and laid-back style into the churches they joined. Their influence would remake the Sunday worship experience for millions of Americans. As the historian Larry Eskridge has argued, today’s evangelical mega-churches with their rock bands blasting praise music and jeans-wearing pastors “are a direct result of the Jesus People movement.”
But aside from the praise anthems and the casual preaching styles that have come to characterize contemporary evangelicalism, the Jesus People also reshaped American politics. They helped to inspire the birth of the religious right. Many conservative evangelicals had long avoided politics, believing it would corrupt their spiritual lives, but the Jesus People contended that Christians couldn’t keep their spiritual and political lives separate. “I think everybody should be a full-time Christian,” the Jesus People rock singer Larry Norman once said.
Religious right leaders would use a similar line of argument to mobilize millions of evangelicals. Even more, conservative evangelicals drew directly from the Jesus People’s self-conception as marginal figures standing apart from a corrupt system. If you’ve ever wondered how the religious right came to dominate American politics while simultaneously presenting themselves as aggrieved outsiders, you can trace some of the answer to the Summer of Love.